CEO of Restspace.io, which lets you build and integrate backends with tiny services and no code. Been CTO and developed across the stack at a range of agencies and startups.
No code tools are great, and very often they will be used to build software that would never have been built without them, like internal business apps customised for a department's specific workflows built by someone with some tech literacy from the actual department. I don't believe they will even significantly reduce the increase in demand for devs over time. For example if performance is a significant issue in the product you're building, I've never heard of a no code tool that will let you improve performance by engineering better.
An interesting problem they do have is that the more powerful these tools get in what they can tackle, the harder it is to learn to use them well. While they may be easier to use in many cases than writing code, the trouble is the knowledge you get is specific to the tool and locks you into it, because in the coding ecosystem, transferability of skills is critical and this leads to a lot of standardisation over languages, how things are done, data representations etc. You don't get this in the no code world so your skills although easier to acquire are much less transferable.
I feel like these Low Code / No Code tools do help non-developers understand the architecture of systems better, and how all the components connect.
It actually helps folks understand the logic of programming in general, because you still use If Statements, Else Statements, Loops, Variables, Reusable Components in these Low Code / No Code tools.
At the end of the day, an If Statement is still an If Statement, regardless if it's in a programming language or a No Code tool.
So, I do believe the acquired skills are transferable.
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No code tools are great, and very often they will be used to build software that would never have been built without them, like internal business apps customised for a department's specific workflows built by someone with some tech literacy from the actual department. I don't believe they will even significantly reduce the increase in demand for devs over time. For example if performance is a significant issue in the product you're building, I've never heard of a no code tool that will let you improve performance by engineering better.
An interesting problem they do have is that the more powerful these tools get in what they can tackle, the harder it is to learn to use them well. While they may be easier to use in many cases than writing code, the trouble is the knowledge you get is specific to the tool and locks you into it, because in the coding ecosystem, transferability of skills is critical and this leads to a lot of standardisation over languages, how things are done, data representations etc. You don't get this in the no code world so your skills although easier to acquire are much less transferable.
Interesting point of view.
I feel like these Low Code / No Code tools do help non-developers understand the architecture of systems better, and how all the components connect.
It actually helps folks understand the logic of programming in general, because you still use If Statements, Else Statements, Loops, Variables, Reusable Components in these Low Code / No Code tools.
At the end of the day, an If Statement is still an If Statement, regardless if it's in a programming language or a No Code tool.
So, I do believe the acquired skills are transferable.